Green Baron

Yes, JWST is planned for L2. The heat shield doesn't need adjustment like it would be necessary in LEO where angles of incoming heat from sun, earth and moon change rapidly while orbiting. It's just a quiet place, there isn't that much traffic (yet) :-) Also keeping it in an orbit around L2 requires only very little dV over the whole mission time (a few 100m/s). And it has a free view on most of the sky over the course of a year. In L2 it is practically in orbit around the sun. See: https://jwst.nasa.gov/orbit.html

Thanks, very impressive ! So cool to see how a bouncing ball reveals itself as planet. For the conditions you have surely beaten the hell out of it !

If the sensor has a protecting glass you could carefully clean that with a tissue for cleaning eyeglasses, or if you have a lens cleaning kit (cleansing liquid, paper, small bellows) you could use that. Anyway it's a good idea to have one at home. If the sensor is exposed you could try to puff the dust off with a bellows or, if you have extremely calm hands and sharp eyes and loupe you could carefully pick the dust up with a cotton bud dipped in cleansing alcohol that evaporates without leaving residue. Flats can correct the dark spot, but they don't regenerate the missing parts of the picture ...

Well done :-) What are the dark spots ?

A, now i see your point. I would say it, in respect to the forming of life, evolution starts with self replicating chemistry. The urge and ability to adapt is built-in from the very beginning. But i am ready to accept different opinions.

Traces of the origins are lost. But at some early point there must have been a transition of some sort. Not like *snip* and there they sit but the forming of the basis, self replicating chemistry if i may say so, is not as strange as one might think. Quick search example: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v11/n5/full/nmeth.2893.html or : http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v16/n1/full/nrg3841.html Subject to debate, don't believe every word ;-) Sorry for straying ot ...

Oh, but yes, evolution is the process of adaptation through variation and selection and does not depend on how it started in the first place. It's a natural thing that happens as soon as conditions are right, much more than a theory, like e. g. general relativity it has proven itself correct in many ways. It is - once it has started - an inherent path to success, seen on a species level. But it needs very much time, energy and favourable conditions, seemingly over billions of years for the development of the variety of spheres to support higher lifeforms like those on earth. Simple microbial life didn't take long to emerge on earth, just a few hundred million years after solidification of the crust. And it can have astonishingly robust forms. So, yeah, why not microbes. But it took another >3 billion years of +/-stable conditions until the first complex biocenosis'. We had that discussion in the Fermi thread (artificial influence on evolution is not involved here). Applying simple probabilities is in my eyes not the correct way to address the question of higher life elsewhere due to the problem of the long time spans and stability of conditions. It all boils down to do i believe in aliens or not. Edit: But until proven otherwise science should concentrate on natural causes for observed phenomena.

Physicists have written books on the current state of research on cosmology. One of those would help understanding why the universe is at it is. Though it's hard stuff, at least for me ...

Aaand ... let's hope the player doesn't get bored of this version of the map, cancels it and generates a new one :-) (have been playin' factorio ...)

My view on this is somewhat classical (Edit: no offense): "Do aliens exist ?" is a question of belief and not sciency at all until aliens have been discovered. There is no way to define an experiment and prove the existence or non-existence of aliens(tm). All that speculation about aliens has actually harmed real science. Some people start looking for intelligent aliens as causes for phenomena and stop to explore natural causes, including possible forms of basic life on other bodies. This is almost becoming a new form of mysticism. My vote is on the third option.

Or a child's rattle or a kinder surprise egg. Shake before use ... but it may melt in the hand :-)

I just wanted to link this but you already did so :-) May i add: preliminary evaluation of the K2 data, not yet published. I do not agree with the "169K is on the snow line" part. At least not H20 snow. 100K are missing if we ignore highly speculative atmospheres or other heating mechanisms that we don't know about. Be it as it may: the star is between 3 and 8 billion years old. There is no reason to assume that the planets have not formed in place. But the system might get instable in the future (a billion of years), see original paper. The E-ELT might be able to actually give images of the planets :-)

The thread might be old but some things just do take their time. News on Enceladus, if it is considered necro just delete it, it's not worth a new thread. http://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0063 Thermal anomalies in the south pole region seem to raise the subsurface temp. by ~20-30K, in absolute from 30 to 60K. Concerning indirect evidence of an ocean and debate of a possible globality: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103515003899 In short: libration modelling hinted pro global ocean, heat exchange and thermal models against.

I'm gonna miss it. But i don't miss it :-) Edit: But this isn't really science or spaceflight, or is it ? Should it be moved to the Lounge ?

Use a different search engine ... Suggestion: block these tagging and filtering sites like google, facebook, youtube, .... completely from your pc/network. The internet will become much clearer, pages load faster and information less narrowed ;-) Is this paranoid ? I don't think so ... :-)

More data via the Nature page or through the team of the University of Liége. The first name in the authors list of the original paper is the one to address. Guys, you overestimate our momentary possibilities by magnitudes. Also much has been put as facts which are just fantasies. Nobody knows what these planets look like, no spectral traces of atmospheres were found (though featureless atmospheres can not be ruled out completely). The orbital parameters of the planets where deduced by changes in the apparent magnitude of the star. I'd laugh out loud if one day we find out that we were hunting sun spots or a yet unknown form of solar activity. This does not mean that i think it is bogus, i think it is serious data that yet needs some interpretation (that's why all the speculation takes place ;-)) but i also think it'll take yet a few years and maybe new telescopes to get a clearer view of that system Btw., the thrilling question for planetary science is not whether there is life but how could such a system possibly form. :-)

Wow, looking forward to this. Hope you post your images :-) There are quite a few satellite images/clips of moon's shadow on earth's surface.

Ha ! That sounds like drivers from southwest Germany. That's the country where those shiny Porsche and Mercedes are built. People there are the worst drivers i know all over Europe and part of America. They define themselves and their egos by the power of their car. They can't wait, they won't give way, they will chase you off the left lane on the autobahn, they push with flashing lights 5m behind you at a speed of 200km/h. But when they are here on La Palma, where roads are narrow, curvy and challenging, where you don't take the hand from the gearshifter, where you need the handbrake when you stop because of slope, where you go 1200m up and down just to reach the other side of the island and you need the engine to break they panic. I see it in the eyes of the German tourists when they drive, they are utterly overburdened with the circumstances. >200hp are useless here. A small diesel (i got a Yaris diesel and rarely use the 5th, never the 6th) or even electric car is second to none. That's so .... satisfying. The locals are reasonable drivers. They stop, give way, rarely speed, wait, even operate the indicators when appropriate. So relaxing. (I'm a German myself just living here and consider myself a slightly below average driver) Yes, that was a rant :-)

Seems to be very robust entertainment ... ... but meanwhile there are a lot of hobbyists and enthusiasts with appropriate equipment. We probably can expect something nice out of this. Though 2 hours might be a little extensive.

Lucky you :-) I will not see it. A little foretaste from last years eclipse. Most of you probably know that Air Alaska conducted a flight so that it met with the totality exactly at the right time. Sun is low and the shadow on the earth prolonged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBoa81xEvNA Do your ears and brain a favour and switch off the speakers ... Edit: buy solar film in quantity NOW because it may be sold out in July. It was the case 1999 in Germany.

It has been quite unexceptional 10-18°C in the last weeks (Atlantic island 28°N). Today temps rose to 30° C, tomorrow the same. After that it shall go down to cosy 10-20° C again. These heat waves are called Calima, very warm air from the Sahara comes over the sea. Dust in suspension limits visibility and high moisture can make life a little sticky for a few days. The moisture is gathered in the way over the say.

I can't answer your questions exactly because of obvious reasons :-)) and because they are out of my scope and knowledge. The direction of time is "set in stone" for the universe, if we ignore singularities, but since these are inside the universe it doesn't matter in the long run. Entropy dictates that it can only move forward. We can model the state of even a simple system only under certain physical conditions and restrictions. That works good enough for everyday use.

Sorry, but the universe is not deterministic. Also, determinism is rater a religion than science. Neither in small scale (subatomic) nor in large scale (galaxies) exact figures cannot be computed. It is only for the restricted conditions we live under and the methods we use that things can be modeled and computed. @Scotius: not only Heisenberg, also n-body movements, vacuum fluctuations in large scale. Live ("compute own death") organisms evolve in a feedback with environment, the environment changes. And it is influenced by extraterrestrial events. Even if you ignored Heisenberg and knew the position and impulse of all particles in your observable universe you only had the current state. Sonner or later chaos would make your computation of the future useless. @daniel l.: you are applying computer game techniques to the universe ...

The outer planets actually go backwards from time to time. Opposition loop. Jupiter is just about, Saturn is next (i think). The astrophotographers here will love it because then they will have him high in sky all spring at part of the summer. That simply happens while the earth overtakes on the inner track, in front of the background of distant stars the outer planet then seems to go backwards. To put it in funny words: Ptolemaios then painted these spirals as a weak excuse because with the earth in center he couldn't explain what was already clear to many others centuries before. Of course he was scoffed at at the end of the antique, but got a revival in the Renaissance when the church needed "science" against that new fangled sun-is-in-the-center stuff :-) Hope that wasn't too impertinent.

I mixed up photons and protons. But it was only verbal and in a computer game forum. No damage occurred.